Please don’t set your program to auto-update my drivers without telling me. Because, no, your newer drivers are not always better, in fact they often break something, which is why I NEVER auto-update drivers (or much of anything else).
Thanks for wasting a good six hours of my life fixing your screwed up driver problem.
Signed,
a massively frustrated customer.
Ideologies neither form a spectrum, nor a grid, nor even a circle. Instead the reality is more complicated, with ideologies agreeing on different issues, often for different reasons in some very odd ways.
Progressivism (as I understand it, I would not call myself a progressive) is fundamentally and first about domestic issues. If someone is willing to sacrifice liberty and economic progress for war then they aren’t a progressive. Likewise, Ron Paul, for example is not a progressive because he disagrees on key domestic issues (even as he agrees on other domestic issues and many issues surrounding war.)
The paleocon right, the libertarian right and the “hard” (what passes for hard in America) left agree substantially on some specific foreign policy issues (the end of empire). They also agree on many economic issues and liberty issues. They disagree on redistributionism and they disagree on positive liberty (making sure that people actually have an even break), as opposed to negative liberty (making sure the government isn’t actively stopping them from having an even break).
Agreement on some issues doesn’t mean libertarianism, progressivism and paleconsevervatism are the same thing, it just means their ideologies agree at various points.
It is fairly commonplace to note that the liberal left lost the working class to social issues when they stopped properly protecting them on economic issues and when the corporate right threw aside actual fiscal conservatism (we’ll promise them services and give them tax cuts!) Again, that doesn’t mean that segment of the population doesn’t agree with the left on a large number of issues, the question is what they prioritize. They regularly say they want liberal policies then vote against them. Priorities, priorities (and they will get what they’re asking for, I’m afraid.)
“Progressives” who support the current wars have decided to sacrifice domestic prosperity and progress for war. That’s the calculation they’ve made, whether they’re willing to admit it or not. And yes, I can say that means they aren’t progressive. I mean, Barack Obama keeps saying he’s a progressive and if you believe that…. Words don’t just mean whatever people want them to mean, in that case I could say I’m a Neocon, because neoconservatism means believing in prosperity and freedom, right?
Bullshit.
Ron Paul’s economic policies, if actually followed, would cause economic armageddon. Don’t get me wrong, I like him, but he’s racist and his policies are largely moronic. He may not work for the rich, but he’s like a doctor saying “well yes, the patient is anemic, so let’s bleed him!”
A lot of people are focusing lately on another pair of ideologies: populism vs. aristocracy/oligarchy. We don’t use the word aristocracy any more, but that’s what the US has and is developing even further.
Americans and most others don’t recognize the ideology of aristocracy any more, because after WWII it pretty much died out in its classical form, but the rent-seekers are pure aristocrats/oligarchs who want to create an economy which is entirely risk free for them and in which every relationship is reduced to revenue streams. (What used to be called “income”).
But to say that’s the “real” fight is to miss the point, because what the solution is to aristocracy matters. “No bailouts” + “drown the government in a bathtub”, ie. Tea Partyism, leads absolutely nowhere good. Right wing solutions, basically, don’t work. The attempt to do them in an even “purer” form won’t work this time either, should it occur. So it’s not enough to say “populism first” and ignore the content of the solutions proposed by various populists. The varieties of right wing and left wing populism are not equal and which one you get matters a lot.
No, I’m not against all wars. But I’m against the Afghan war, the “secret” war in Yemen, the occupation of Iraq, and any war with Iran under any circumstances I can imagine.
Why? Because:
As noted, I’m not opposed to all wars. Hell I even supported the Afghan war up to the point where it became clear that it was destabilizing Pakistan, polls of Afghans indicated they wanted us out, and it become obvious it couldn’t be “won” in any meaningful sense.
Anyone who supports the current wars is not someone I have much time for, I’m afraid. I regard them as fundamentally stupid wars and significantly immoral to boot, plus on pragmatic terms I believe they are doing more harm than good to the US, not just economically, but in terms of real security and in terms of the erosion of civil liberties. States at permanent war cannot and do not maintain their liberties. Permanent occupations are particularly corrupting and badly damage the real war fighting capacity of the armies doing them (see Army, Israeli).
Anyone who’s in favour of imperial wars and permanent war can’t really be on the left in any meaningful fashion, because the cost of permanent war is:
To a liberal, military spending is a necessary evil, and as such you do only as much as is necessary to:
And that’s about it. Every dollar spent on the military is not spent on actual economically productive activity. Yes, there are some exceptions, but there are other ways to do R&D spending, and more and more military R&D is not applicable to civilian matters.
(I’m sure Vladimir Putin laughs himself sick every night that the US pays him off to help America stay in Afghanistan. The irony must be one of the great joys of his life.)
In terms of dependence on foreign commodities, the progressive solution is to move the energy basis of the US economy off of oil and onto a basis which is much more domestically available (and built). That way you don’t need to be able to knock around middle eastern nations.
While many lefties wouldn’t agree with me, I would also move to mandatory service, everyone serving 2 to 4 years. Most wouldn’t serve in the military, but every male and any woman who wants it would get military training. A militarily trained population tends to concentrate the minds of politicians and other elites and I also believe that the military should be much more representative of the population as a whole, for a variety of reasons.
What do you do with all those people in national service? Rebuild the country: teach them skills and put them to work on broadband, infrastructure of various kinds, refitting all buildings for energy efficiency, etc… Why? Well, because that makes the country more secure and safer by reducing dependence on foreign oil, etc… (Well, that’s one reason.)
In my opinion anyone who’s for the current war is delusional or attached to the military industrial complex and willing to betray their country’s real interests for money. The US cannot afford war. Period. To be for war right now is to be for the ruin of America.
In light of the attempted murder of Representative Giffords, in which others did die, many on the left have been saying that Republicans need to stop violent rhetoric, because some people take it seriously. Crazies in some cases. (Note that it’s not clear that Loughner was necessarily one of them, mind you.)
But let’s assume the constant atmosphere of violent rhetoric did have some effect. Why would the right stop it? The press I’m reading and seeing is mostly of the “pox on both sides violent rhetoric” variety. Yes, Palin is running from her crosshairs, but at the end of the day she was never viable and the people who support her, which is to say, give her money, aren’t going to stop doing so. They’ll believe he was “just a crazy” or that Jared Loughner was really a left winger, of whatever it takes to believe it had nothing to do with her: or with them. Two months from now this won’t be shown to have moved the needle on the polls, and it won’t have destroyed the career of anyone who mattered.
Moreover, the fact is that violence often does work. For example, when Doctor Tiller, one of only three late term abortion providers in the entire country, was killed, his family chose to shut down his clinic. His assassin got what he wanted, and said he was perfectly happy to go to jail. And why not? If you believe that Dr. Tiller was a mass murderer, then killing him is just.
As long as politicians who aren’t Republicans (I won’t say left wingers, Giffords isn’t particularly left wing) are constantly called traitors, some people will take that seriously. And if they are traitors, well, they deserve death, don’t they?
Right wing talk of violence is acceptable in American society. And it will continue because violence and the threat of violence works in American society.
Now let’s be clear, one reason it works is because politicians have, in fact, repeatedly and consistently, as a class, acted against the interests of Americans. Americans have spent the past 35 odd years with a stagnant or declining standard of living. The life expectancy of Americans recently dropped (which should tell you that all the numbers that say Americans aren’t getting slagged are BS), something which happened in Russia not long before their collapse.
Ordinary Americans work longer and harder and get a smaller proportion of the societies benefits every year.
Of course, right wing solutions aren’t, they’ll just make things worse. But Americans live in a complete propaganda state, and don’t know up from down. The right controls every major media organ, and is able to get pluralities or majorities of Americans to believe things which simply aren’t true, like that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 (70% of Americans believed that. That didn’t happen by mistake, since there’s no evidence of it.)
Confused, lied to, living in a world which doesn’t make any sense, because it isn’t intended to make sense, and in a situation where even if they aren’t personally in financial trouble, they are only one bad bounce away from winding up on the street, being bankrupted by health care bills and then dying anyway, what is amazing about American political violence isn’t that there is so much of it, but that there is as little as there is.
The pattern is clear enough. Major corporate interests have bled the country white. Whether these are financial interests, the military industrial complex, the telecom companies or the various medical interests, the result is the same: the rich are filthy rich, corporations making record profits and ordinary people taking it in the neck. They have then bought up the major media, which they use for propaganda purposes. Fox is the major offender, but no major outlet is immune.
The political class works for the corporate class, not the other way around. It doesn’t have to be that way, all the levers are available to crush the corporate class any time the political class wants to, but the fact remains that the corporate class calls the shots, not the other way around. During the debate over TARP calls against ran from 100:1 against to 1200:1 against. It still passed. The public option was more popular than the health care bill that passed by a huge margin, but it was traded away early and never seriously considered.
It is useful to the corporate class for the political class to live in fear, however. What I am hearing is that many politicians and their staff do draw a line between violent right wing rhetoric and what happened to Giffords.
But most members at the very top of the corporate class, like the Koch brothers, live in such rarified circumstances that they hardly ever see an ordinary person. They fly in private jets, they stay in $50,000/night hotel rooms or private estates and so on. Politicians, on the other hand, have to glad hand. It is their job to handle ordinary people. They are, and always will be, exposed to violence.
If that violence is inspired by the right, if the right are the people showing up with guns, well, what’s the problem, exactly, for the corporate class? If politicians are scared to do anything non-right wing, how does that hurt the very rich? Oh sure, violence might get out of control, but it’s pretty clear they don’t really believe that, or they wouldn’t have spent hundreds of millions on the Republican side of the last election, would they have?
No, Giffords is a sign post on the road. That sign post may say stop, but this intersection will at most be a slight pause in the trip.
Times are tough, all around, and I know that’s true of many of my readers. It’s also true of a couple of good bloggers. The first is Roy Edroso of Alicublog, who skewers the right in fine style. He’s down and out, living with a friend and could use a helping hand if you can afford to give it. He wouldn’t ask for himself, so his friends are doing so. You can donate to Roy Edroso here.
The second is DCBlogger, who is in some difficulty as well. She’s perhaps best known for her blogging at Corrente, but she also has a home blog. She isn’t on the street yet, and it would be nice to help make sure it stays that way. You can donate here.
Nothing’s really free in life. No one has to pay to read blogs, but someone does have to work to create the content. There is always a cost. If you can give, please do. If, on the other hand, you’re in trouble yourself, please don’t give.
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